


My heart is in a safe (in your hands)

by Unlikelyoptimist



Category: Leverage
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e15 The Long Goodbye Job, Established Parker/Hardison, F/M, Flashbacks, M/M, Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma, Unestablished ot3, Yoga
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-19 14:15:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9445034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unlikelyoptimist/pseuds/Unlikelyoptimist
Summary: After a job goes wrong, Hardison barely escapes with his life, but the aftermath takes its toll on them all.





	1. Chapter 1

It was an all-around bad job.

 

Eliot had accidentally referred to their Scottish mark “British.” (The mark had not been pleased in the slightest). Parker had accidentally left behind a key piece of information when grabbing the files from their mark’s desk (“Who’s stupid enough to use incriminating evidence as a gum wrapper? How was I supposed to know it was in the trash?”). None of it, however, blew up so literally in their faces as the bridge.

 

Hardison’s task had been disabling the explosive charges under the bridge, an old one made mostly of wood and prayers. It had been scheduled for demolition, but their mark planned on blowing it early, pinning the mistake on the construction company and suing them for negligence. In their habitual faith in Hardison’s abilities, neither Eliot or Parker had considered the possibility that one of the charges would go off.

 

So, of course, one did.

 

Had Hardison not made it almost outside the blast radius in time, he would have been a corpse crushed to death under piles of rubble and tons of wood. As it was, he was still trapped in place under several luckily placed beams for almost half an hour before Eliot showed up to pull him out. Eliot didn’t realize the full implication of what’d happened until he found Hardison on the verge of hyperventilation, splinters under his fingernails from clawing at the wood.

 

“You alright, Hardison?”

 

“Get me the hell out of here.”

 

No snappy retort, no quip. It wasn’t a good sign.

 

“Hang in there, man, I almost got you out. Just one more second-“

 

Eliot heaved the beam onto his shoulder, and Parker helped Hardison clamber out from the rubble. His chest was heaving, hands shaking so hard that they made Parker appear to be trembling where he gripped her.

 

Thud.

 

Eliot dropped the beam back to the ground, and Hardison sank back onto the riverbank, head in his hands. To a guy who had almost died from being buried alive once, Eliot could see easily where a second brush with the experience would be unsettling.

 

“What happened?” It was a delicate question, and as Eliot was not a person generally required to ask delicate questions, it came out more brusquely than he’d intended. Hardison bristled.

 

“Damn charge was faulty. I did everything right on my end, clipped every wire in the right order, but someone wired it wrong to begin with. Didn’t almost blow myself up through incompetence, if that’s what you’re asking.”

 

Parker chewed at her lip, a habit that appeared only in times of severe pressure. Eliot could guess at the reason; it seemed that every time something went wrong through unforeseeable circumstance, every time there was a pinch, it was Hardison who ended up between the rock and the hard place. Eliot knew Parker had puzzled and pounded her head against the problem again and again, frantic to solve it before it resulted in something worse than cuts and bruises.

 

Eliot knew that Parker was the best suited to take Nate’s place, but her failing came into play when it came for calculating human error. When facing an opponent, Parker often forgot to make allowances for the possibility that they would make the mistake, because to her, incompetence and error were not options. She assumed that the same would be true for others.

 

Eliot admired her for it, but knew what Nate would have said.

 

_You’ve got to think less of people, Parker. That’s all._

“We gotta get going. Police are gonna be here in about ten minutes with an explosion this big, and we need to not be standing here when they get here.”

 

Parker nodded mutely. Hardison didn’t acknowledge Eliot’s words at all, but stood and followed Parker to the van. He slammed the back of the van shut, but it didn’t hide the way his hands were still shaking.


	2. Chapter 2

The job had been finished, thanks to plan G, for two weeks now. Despite this, they hadn’t so much as interviewed a new client. Parker refused, and when pressed for answers by both Eliot and Hardison, said only that there were some kinks that needed worked out first.

 

Even accounting for human error, there had been no way to plan around the fact that those charges had needed rewired. Someone would have needed to do it.

 

Eliot would have been better suited to do it, from a safety perspective. He would have reacted faster to any imminent explosion, instinctively protected himself, and half an hour in the wreckage would have caused him nothing more than some grumbling about picking splinters from his shoulders the next day. It would not have left him shaking and shaken, disappearing for long stretches after returning to the brewpub and deliberately avoiding any space more enclosed than a bathroom.

 

The problem, of course, was that Eliot did not have the technical experience Hardison did, and had been more likely to make a mistake in disarming them. When she’d run the cost benefit analysis in her head, weighed the risks, she had gauged Hardison the safer choice – and yet, sitting silently next to Hardison as he played games with his online clan, it still felt like a mistake.

 

After another restless night of half-hearted jokes from Hardison and their shared bed feeling too small, she waited until Hardison was out meeting with a new grocer to supply the brewpub and went to find Eliot. She found him in the kitchen, not cooking, but doing dishes. Steam was rising from the sink, but Eliot didn’t so much as blink before he plunged his hands into the near scalding water, scrubbing at a stubborn spot of dried egg on a spatula.

 

“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

 

Looking up and searching her face briefly, Eliot tugged a towel from his waist and tossed it to Parker, who caught it reflexively. A second later, he thrust a dripping wet spatula into her hand, and she began to dry it, leaning on the counter as she did so.

 

“I didn’t know the bridge was going to collapse. If I’d known that, I would have figured out another way. Or if I’d had to send someone, I’d have sent you.”

 

Apparently amused by this, Eliot snorted.

 

“What’s funny?”

 

Eliot shook his head, and she went back to unravelling her problem.

 

“But even if I’d known it was going to collapse, and that he was going to be okay, I didn’t know it would upset him like that. I don’t know why it did, even now. The danger’s over, but he’s still scared.”

 

“Why don’t you ask him about all this?”

 

Both of Parker’s eyebrows drew together, slanting down in a sharp frown.

 

“You sound like Sophie.”

 

“Parker.”

 

Having to practice grifting more often meant that she was making marginal improvement at techniques like stalling, and deflecting. Unfortunately, it worked much better on people that weren’t Eliot, who always moved through her delays and diversions like they were so many cobwebs, easy to walk right through.

 

“I don’t know how to do it without hurting him. It’s like a safe that has a burn button; I can’t open it without burning everything inside. I don’t want to do that.”

 

Reaching over, Eliot plucked the spatula, long dry, out of Parker’s hands. He replaced it with a frying pan before immersing his hands into the water once more.

 

“If I had to guess, probably reminded him of the funeral home job. One where he got buried.”

 

Seeing the lack of comprehension on Parker’s face, he paused, the soapy water stilling in the sink. It was always visible in Eliot’s face when he was changing his plan of attack. Sophie had once pointed out that his eyes moved slightly to the side and stayed there, to keep himself from visibly tracking exits and evaluating the room. Now that she knew the tell was there, it was impossible to unsee, like the pattern of a laser grid.

 

“When something happens to you that hurts, what do you do with it?” The pan was dripping onto

Parker’s jeans now, the towel hanging unused and forgotten at her side. She stared, not bothering to hide her confusion at the path the conversation had taken.

 

“I lock it up inside, in a safe. With all the other things.” Parker was aware that not everyone was like this, that some people’s feelings were on their sleeves and their faces and in their voices, that they weren’t contained by four walls of silk-smooth stainless steel, distant and guarded.

 

“But sometimes things get out, right?”

 

Parker thought of Sophie and her soft smiles and the way her hand always waited half a second above Parker’s arm before resting there, long enough for her to pull away. Of Eliot stopping what he was doing and cooking her a plate of food, explaining to her how to let it make her feel something. Of Hardison’s shoulder touching hers in Russia with the orphans, of Hardison’s voice humming softly as she dragged weighted boots over the carpet, of pretzels.

 

“Sometimes I let people break in, if they’re smart and they’re careful and they listen to the alarms if they set them off by accident. Then they can take whatever it is out, if they’re careful, and if they promise to put them back if I ask. Sometimes I let them keep it.”

 

It was a little longer before Eliot’s next response. Parker could hear his caution like soft footfalls in her head, like a hand spinning a dial with meticulous precision so as not to miss a thing. Finally, he removed his hands from the water, taking both the towel and the dripping pan from Parker and setting them aside.

 

“You remember that douchebag who conned people into believe he could talk to people’s dead family and stuff?  The one you ran into with Nate when you guys were casing the place?”

 

A jerky nod. She remembered, but she didn’t like to.

 

“When he was reading you, that was different. Right?”

 

Glaring at Eliot for daring to ask her to think back on it, and relenting only when she remembered that all this was supposedly for Hardison, she tried to remember. It had felt like…like…

 

“It was like he blew the safe open. Went right past all the alarms and motion sensors and pressure plates, and just blasted in. And he took it out when he wasn’t supposed to, and he let other people see it-“ To her relief, Eliot interrupted, preventing her from a spiral into renewed rage, a rekindled desire to find him and make him pay more.

 

“Right. And it was something worth you asking to kill a guy over. Cause it sucked.” A nod. “That’s what the bridge did for Hardison. It pulled the memory of the coffin back out when he wasn’t ready for it, when he didn’t want to be remembering it, and so it hurt, and it sucked.”

 

She struggled to keep her own recollection of that day from escaping, and Eliot chose that moment to pick up the pan he’d abandoned and dry it, putting it back in the correct cabinet. When he closed it, Parker was staring at him.

 

What she was about to say seemed like something that was private, because it had happened in a moment between the two of them. Telling a stranger would have been bad, a mistake. Even telling Nate or Sophie would have been a betrayal of trust, but this was Eliot. If Eliot had been there, Parker was sure Hardison would have showed him the same secret.

 

“Hardison can’t sleep. Sometimes I wake up, and he’s just not in bed. He’ll be up, playing games online. One time I woke up when he was still asleep, but he was muttering. Tossing and turning. I tried to hold him, because he likes that, but it made him nervous, and he got up again to play games.” She did not tell Eliot this, but when he’d told her to go back to sleep, he hadn’t called her babe, or woman, or Parker. He’d just told her to go to sleep, too tired for nicknames, too tired for her. She could hear the break in her own voice when she rehearsed trying to explain it, and so she didn’t.

 

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

 

Eliot shook his head. The tiny crease in his eyebrows told Parker that he could hear it too, the break in her unsaid words. He didn’t pat her on the shoulder, or hug her, but he turned and leaned against the counter next to her, staying still until she leaned an inch to the left and bumped her shoulder against his.

 

“Ain’t your fault, Parker. He’s gotta decide whether he’s gonna put that feeling back, or he’s gonna let it stay out in the open and live with it.”


	3. Chapter 3

The worst part about almost asphyxiating to death hadn’t actually been the asphyxiation.

To be fair, it’d been pretty crappy. Hardison could still feel a phantom tingle in his muscles when he remembered the way his body had jerked, chest rising and falling in aborted movements as he’d clamped his hand over his mouth, tears trickling from his eyes. His throat would still tighten, but a deep breath would remind his nervous lungs that there was nothing to fear, and the reminder would dissipate.

No, the worst part had been the weight. 468 pounds of literal soil that had been less than a foot above his body for the whole half hour, imposing thousands of pounds of metaphorical weight on his chest, his lungs, his throat, his forehead. The air itself had taken on near-solidity, pressing at him from all sides, no longer a taken for granted luxury but now an active threat.

All it had taken was two goddamn pieces of wood to recreate the feeling.

The beam on his chest was a lot less than 468 pounds, but that didn’t matter. All it took was the realization that he couldn’t move, that he was trapped, and he was right back in the coffin. His earpiece had been laying uselessly a few feet away, knocked out by the explosion, and so there had been no Parker to talk him through it. There had been no cellphone to call with, and if another beam had happened to fall and bash his skull it, there would have been no one around to stop it.

There wasn’t any amount of hacking in the world that could protect him from that.

“Hardison?”

The screen told him that he’d disconnected the controller; a quick look downwards told him he’d been clamping his hand down on the “off” button. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and his heart was thudding hard enough to bruise against his ribcage.

“I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

Parker didn’t sit up, but she stared, not attempting to hide her unhappiness. Hardison hated to see her unhappy, especially when her mood was generally so hard to bring down, but he didn’t know what to tell her. His words, just like the rest of him, felt compressed under six feet of soil. Nevertheless, he tried again.

“Gotta get your sleep if you’re gonnna go around jumping off of buildings tomorrow. Get some sleep, babe.” He could feel the smile failing on his own face, a line of code gone corrupt.

She sat with her head leaned on her hand, elbow propped up on the pillow, and shook her head.

“I’ll go to bed when you do.”

The same impasse they’d reached the last three days. He didn’t even know why he bothered.

Hardison shrugged, about to go back to his game when there was a knock at the door. Eliot had never used to bother knocking until Hardison and Parker started sharing a room, when he’d become meticulously careful about it all at once. Parker had informed Hardison once with a smirk that this was because Eliot had no desire to walk in on them “gettin it on.” He’d only stopped spluttering when she’d leaned into kiss him, figuring that if it earned them a little privacy, that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“We all having a sleepover party that I didn’t know about? Cause I got news for you, I don’t have any long flowing hair to braid like you and Parker.”

The door opened, and Eliot was scowling. “It ain’t that long. I just got it trimmed before the job.” Before Hardison could pull from his extensive collection of ‘Rapunzel’ or ‘Goldilocks’ jabs, Eliot was yanking the controller out of his hand.

“Hey, man. If you’re about to have some kind of Hulk tantrum, go throw something that’s not a customized-“

“Shut up, Hardison.”

“Now that’s just rude.”

“I’m not kidding. Shut up and listen to me for a sec.”

For the first time, Hardison noticed that Eliot was holding something under his arm. He stared for an extra second, just to be sure before he said something, because he was starting to think this was a hyper-detailed lucid dream. Behind him, Parker had shifted into a sitting position, resting her chin lightly on his shoulder.

“Are those…yoga mats? Dude, are you sleepwalking right now? Because if so, I’d like to get a sworn confession that notorious hitter Eliot Spencer does yoga before you wake up.”

The scowl deepened, which gave Hardison a sense of deep satisfaction. He prided himself on being the most effective at needling Eliot no matter the situation, especially knowing that all of Eliot’s growled threats of murder and mutilation would never amount to more than a punch on the arm.

“You’re gonna sit on your ass all day playing with imaginary orcs, and then expect me to be embarrassed for doing yoga? I got news for you-“ Stopping abruptly, Eliot shook his head, thinking better of the longwinded explanation. This was a newly acquired habit of self restraint that Hardison was still working on cracking, which he had no doubt he would achieve in due time.

“Never mind. Just take one of the mats,” Eliot said, shoving stacks of magazines and delicate electronics out of the way none too gently to make room for three of them.

“No explanation, no nothing? You’re seriously gonna just come into our room at-“ he checked his computer- “1:46 in the morning, throw some yoga mats down, and expect us to start balancing on one leg? Cause-“

“Look,” Eliot ground out through gritted teeth, pointing his rolled up yoga mat at Hardison threateningly. “If I was Sophie, I’d sit down and talk to you for about ten seconds and then you’d feel all better, because Sophie’s good at that crap. I ain’t Sophie, so I’m trying to help doing what I know how to do, and you don’t seem like a kickboxing kinda guy. So just-just get on the yoga mat, okay? We don’t gotta make a big deal about it.”

The resulting silence was uncomfortable for all of them. Hardison turned to look at Parker, whose chin was now digging sharply into the bone of his shoulder.

“You told him? Seriously?”

“I tried to help first. But I couldn’t. You wouldn't talk to me, you wouldn't let me make you feel better, you just...shut down.” Her voice is defensive, coiled and ready to fight back against the accusatory tone, and he feels a pang of guilt, followed by irritation. This is his problem, his shit. He can’t just feel bad about how it makes someone else feel bad, because then it’s just one big cycle of feeling bad, rinse wash repeat.

Eliot is facing him with folded arms, raised eyebrows. Waiting, and not patiently.

“You’re out of your damn mind if you think yoga is gonna do anything but make me cranky and sore,” Hardison muttered, nevertheless peeling his socks off and clambering off the bed and onto the yoga mat. He doubted strongly that a few toe-touches were somehow going to help him feel better about the constantly impending possibility of being crushed to death on a mission, but he could only play so many rounds of Overwatch. Parker followed, sitting on her own with her renewed bouncy energy, and Hardison groaned at the realization of how unflexible and awkward he’s going to look next to bendy, semi-contortionist Parker.

“Don’t worry about it. We all look stiff as boards next to Parker,” Eliot said, looking more resigned than anything else as Parker ‘warmed up’ by doing a perfect split.

“Didn’t say I was worried. In fact, I think you’re gonna be surprised when I pull some Cirque du Soleil shit outta my back pocket and blow your socks off. Well,” he said, glancing down at Eliot’s bare feet, “metaphorical socks, anyways.”

More than anything else, Eliot’s expression of deep irritation and regret was comforting to Hardison. Eliot’s quick temper, all flare and no heat, was one of the few things that Hardison had come to depend on. In a life of rapidly shifting variables, it was nice to have to have a few constants in the equation. It helped distract him from crossed wires in his chest.

For the first time in days, he cracked a real smile. 

"Alright. We're gonna start with a deep breath." 


End file.
